A Lighter Logic
by hundredacresky
Summary: [ShikaIno, AU] One little favor may not have seemed like too much to ask for, but in Shikamaru's opinion, there was no such thing as a good road trip.  Especially when Ino was involved.
1. The mayonnaise aesthetic didn't suit him

**A Lighter Logic**

Naruto is the sole property of one Kishimoto M. I'm just taking them for a walk.  
AU/Gen/Romance/Humor  
Shikamaru/Ino  
**A/N: **More? Reviews will rock my world indefinitely. ♥

* * *

PCK UP A CURRY BUN, the text message read; all-caps denoting urgency, impatience and, ultimately, laziness. Considering the sender, it was likely a mottled assortment of all three. The battery on his cell phone gave a feeble beep of neglect, protesting the fact that it had been far, far too long since the last time it had been charged.

The noise also insinuated another beckoning: FRM THT MOON BKRY ON CNSTNCE ST.

Shikamaru rued the day this mess had started.

--

It had been a Tuesday, for sure. Shikamaru swore he'd never forget the date so as to use it as extortion-fodder against the Powers That Were when they tried to send him to hell, or, you know, the _actual _equivalent. Please observe Specimen A: The Day You (referring specifically to Your Excellencies, of course) Ruined My Life.

It had all begun one apparently inconspicuous morning at work.

For starters, someone had proverbially pissed in his co-worker's cereal, resulting in her rollickingly bad mood from the get-go. Shikamaru, stepping foot into the office, immediately sensed the sinister aura of him own impending doom – a time-honoured result of his strangely innate Angry Woman Radar (courtesy, of course, of his lovely mother), but mostly deduced from the disgruntled snort she gave at the very sight of him.

"Oh," Asahi said, sighing aggravatedly and turning back to her blinking computer screen. "It's just you."

Well, it was starting to smell suspiciously like one of those days. Shikamaru, knowing a relatively hefty handful of things, realised that today was one in which he'd have to sail fairly low – no problem for him, as he was rather agreeable with peaceful solitude. Hostile situations like these usually required an offering of chocolate or something vaguely akin – failing that, there was always the tried and true method of Shutting Up and Sitting Down. He also figured that making any sudden movements might be rather counter-productive.

So Shikamaru tossed her only _one_ tired and confused glance before making his way over to his own cubicle and heaving himself into one of the ridiculously comfortable desk chairs – the sort of _ridiculously comfortable_ that actually resulted in the discoloured wallspace around the door, where bits of paint had fallen off from time and trauma. Or in other words: from that one time he actually disregarded the immense trouble involved in bringing (read: stealing) that chair home to decorate his sparse living room, only to find, to his frustrated surprise, that it had been brought into the office and assembled there. Incidentally, it was also too big to fit. Surprise, surprise.

Lesson well learned, Shikamaru admitted, somewhat bitterly. I'll never do anything troublesome again.

"You're not going to leave that there, I hope," was Asahi's sudden challenge, clearly not seeing the unspoken 'Leave Me the Hell Alone' written all over Shikamaru's perfectly innocuous, currently low-sailing face.

Oh, she was like this for a reason.

In the wake of what was now dubbed The Breakup from Hell (mostly by other coworkers, of the nosier variety), Shikamaru had expanded his plethora of knowledge by a few more desperately unneeded facts:

a) Somewhere in last past six months, someone in the higher-ups had up and broken the whole 'no soliciting with co-workers' rule, venerable and integral to the greater workplace hive mind as it was.

b) Aerospace technician #12, AKA: Minato Asahi, was the lucky lady embroiled in said scandal.

c) Shikamaru, painfully trying to avoid getting embroiled in said a)-through-b) scandal, realized that his chair was a freaking sleep-a-palooza in yellow upholstering – a result of many work hours' worth of careful ignorance and feigned naps.

d) Scandalous topics were likely headed for scandalous ends. This one proved no exception, occurring as a painful break-up with a healthy side of Yelling in Public Places and an Ocean Full of Tears, to add insult to injury.

e) It was now empirically proven that the 'no soliciting with coworkers' rule prevented bouts of public workplace distress, drama-queen thrashing sessions and sudden misandry, therefore making it incontestably integral to the promotion of a male-safe work environment.

Shikamaru, opening his eyes with pained and deliberate slowness, kept his gaze on the ceiling, counting plasterboard panels as she spoke.

"I said—" Asahi interjected.

Panel four, light. Panel five, panel six, light. "I heard you the first time."

That was mouthy, Shikamaru thought, wincing internally. Not quite low enough, sailor.

Wrath incurred, Asahi spun towards him, taking one moment to visually partake in about six different kinds of murder, all of which strangely ended up with Shikamaru gutted and creatively hanging upon the coatrack – necessity was, after all, the mother of invention.

And then she looked at his desk. Out of the corner of his eye, Shikamaru could sense what had happened: Asahi had caught sight of his empty coffee mug and was now glaring utter daggers at it.

It was a little unfair, really. So it might have been ugly and slightly feminine and admittedly unwashed, but as far as Shikamaru was concerned, none of the above had ever been any reason for discrimination.

"Your coffee mug," the She-Overlord of Darkness intercepted, a tad unnecessarily.

Obligingly, Shikamaru glanced at the offending item. The '_this entirely innocuous, completely harmless, and existing-solely-within-the-confines-of-__**my**__-desk coffee mug?'_ went unspoken, but lingered sarcastically in the air. Oh, it lingered indeed, and Asahi was having none of that today, or ever.

"It's hideous and it's been sitting there for three days. You could wash it, at least, or possibly throw it away." She gave a harsh and embittered laugh. "Oh no, you're a guy. _Of course_ you couldn't do that."

A ventured 'why' would likely end up with her shoe in his mouth, so Shikamaru figured he'd avoid the trouble. What he really needed, though, much more than a mouthful of cheap and foot-rash-ridden pleather, was a smoke. As in, right now.

"God," Asahi chuckled seethingly, tapping a frantic staccato against her knee with a poor pencil. "It's distracting me from over here, and god knows _you're_ not helping with the project deadline."

Touché, Shikamaru thought blandly, watching the snake-trail shadows of passers-by across their ground-floor window. The afternoon daylight mingled hotly with the sunshine and somewhere out there was a patch of sky with a perfect number of clouds – not too many but far from being vacant blue – and him without an afternoon off. A tragedy, indeed.

Asahi snorted and asked, in a totally unsociable way: "Where the hell did you _get_ that thing, anyway?"

Which Shikamaru, for all his purported brains, should have seen as one of her evil leading tactics a mile away, but didn't, instead weighing the relative tradeoff of her mild satisfaction (and possibly, _possibly_ her shutting up. Or failing that, her discrimination headlights aimed at someone who _wasn't_ him) and a stroll down grassy memory lane, and came to the conclusion that even though said lane was nowadays unkempt and burly with weeds, the latter was the kind of reward even _he_ would walk through searing fire for.

So, fine. The mug: ostensibly green and Pepto-pink, chipped along the rim and once smelling of an array of flowers he would never admit to knowing the names of. Shikamaru looked at it sitting there, innocuous in all its odious glory; thought tiredly of a scattered childhood of potato chip bags, tiger lily petals and shougi pieces, and finally conceded: "It was a gift."

"God," snorted Asahi in all smugness. "They must've _hated_ you."

---

Interestingly enough, Asahi had a terribly decent throwing arm.

And so Shikamaru was made privvy to when he had stood up abrubtly, cutting their conversation despairingly short, and left to smoke out that niggling gut-wrench feeling of craving. Solving the new dent in his head was another matter, though.

Contrary to popular belief, one _couldn't _live on a strict diet of Marlboro lights, and conquering this one yearning had cleared the stage for another – of the rumbly sort. Maybe it wouldn't be _too_ troublesome to get something to eat, he conceded, slouching over to the only restaurant cum trendy hipster café providing remotely edible food.

When Shikamaru passed the small parkette around the corner, shoulders hunched against the frigid gale, his plan was mildly thwarted. "Well, well," said an incongruently jovial voice from his left. "If it isn't the shitting genius."

In an act of utter geniality, Shikamaru forcibly restrained himself from groaning out loud and/or uttering inappropriate profanities. It was Mr. Narita, of course, the kind and rather toddly old man that seemed to be around every available corner with a Go challenge after that one and only time Shikamaru had stopped playing games of shidogo (of course, Mr. Narita wasn't good enough to realise) and completely swept the floor with him. When Shikamaru, learning from his mother that respect of his elders was far, far above cleanliness and godliness and all that other tripe, relented back into his original pushed losses, Narita would kick up a storm and demand rematch after rematch, until Shikamaru managed to somehow wrangle himself away and grudgingly return to work.

Sometimes, Shikamaru sort of suspected Mr. Narita was one hell of a self-masochist in loafers if he had ever seen one. But then again, it took one to know one.

"You're not going to let this out-of-town whippersnapper get away with that last win!" Said the shougi partner du jour, a tiny old man Shikamaru had seen Mr. Narita playing before and remembered by the sheer voluminous mound that was his head. The man clearly had some sort of hat-hoarding fetish, and insisted on wearing them one on top of the other every single day – for reasons that Shikamaru was fairly sure would forever remain indecipherable to most human beings. The weather's sudden turn for the worse had just given him an additional reason. He grinned widely at Shikamaru from a silly and toothless mouth.

Mr. Narita bristled. "An out-of-town whippersnapper he may be, but he's a bloody genius on the board. You'll see. Shika, boy, how about a game?"

"Nah, old man," he declined lazily, looking down the road at the two or so more blocks left to overcome. "There's a sandwich waiting for me at The Watering Hole. Maybe later."

"Hippies, the whole lot of them," Mr. Narita harrumphed in his low, grumbly way, but embroiled as he was in a heated game-battle with Tiny and Toothless, he was, for once, willing to let it slide. "Alright, alright. Say, Shika, what's this? You're bleeding, you are!"

Right. Sandwich, another cigarette, and back into the male-employee-harassing-coffee-mug-hurling-lion's den. "Coffee mug," he explained cryptically, not bothering to elaborate even at their puzzled faces. Then, taking one long look at their game, added: "Checkmate in sixteen moves."

Exactly sixteen moves later, Tiny and Toothless blinked carefully at the board, the memory of Shikamaru's strange prophecy lingering in the air between the two of them. "I… resign," he confessed, utterly dumbfounded.

Mr. Narita pushed aside his surprise and, breaking into a wide grin, taunted: "I told you so, didn't I? Boy genius, he is. An utter genius."

"Yeah," conceded T&T gruffly. "But he's still an out-of-towner."

--

A cold front had taken hostile charge of the city in recent weeks, sweeping in from the north and causing the delicate morning-time etchings in frost along windows everywhere. Despite the fact that Shikamaru was the (not-so-proud) owner of several colour-permutations of scarves large and ugly (courtesy, once more, of one overbearing mother), he was still dressed bone-chillingly wrong for the weather, resulting in the consumption of about four cigarettes in the six-block distance between his office building and the deli, plus one-and-a-half handfuls worth of brittle and very blue fingers.

Looking back on it all, the sandwiches _were_ typically a little dry, making the tradeoff of one (1) very tasteless meal to the frost-bite induced risk of seven (7) digits – with the exception of the cigarette-holding forefinger, middle finger and thumb – seem a tad unbalanced.

There was a very good reason for this, in addition to the mere fact that digging up the purposefully buried winterwear was totally bothersome. And it was that Tiny and Toothless had been completely right in the first place, since Shikamaru _wasn't_ from around here, at all.

He had grown up in the local suburbia of another town in another part of the country, a quirky little winding-street neighbourhood possessing its own name at that. The Leafy Gales, or more affectionately, The Leaf.

The general (and fairly sparse) populace teemed with young, plastic yuppies recently moved in, laden with money but not enough things to spend it on other than copious amounts of picture-perfect home décor and golf paraphernalia. These couples usually had the standard amount of young children (2 or 3, all within one or two years of the other) but the not-so-standard waistline measurements for the new mothers ("25 inches," Shikamaru's mother tutted once, after their new neighbours had come over to introduce themselves. "The poor thing was about to break in half." Shikamaru was about to assert that her pity had come _after_ she had laced the girl's café au lait with 18 cream, thus rendering it redundant, but kept his mouth shut in the end, inevitably knowing far, far better.)

As such, there had been a pretty set number of kids in their general age group and few new ones moved in (the only one being that Sai guy… and the bizarre tanlines everyone now associated with him), leaving them with necessity-honored friendships of familiarity and convenience, but god knew those were the best kinds, anyway.

So it was funny that the issue of the mug should have come up that day. Since only the night before, Shikamaru, for once slightly sleepless (!) at the bizarre weather change, had stared at the urgent and blinking cursor on his computer screen and actually considered writing home. And if the power hadn't gone out and Shikamaru had no choice but to go to bed, since waiting it out would be mighty troublesome irregardless of the fact that it was still 7:30 at night, he might have done it, too.

It had been a while, anyway.

"Coffee with that?" The barista asked him, sliding the boring ham sandwich across the counter. There were other choices, probably tastier and around the exact same price, but that would involve an amount of personal investment Shikamaru had never really been up to. Food was for sustenance, not personal indulgence. At least not for Shikamaru, anyway. He had always left that up to Chouji.

"Nah," he replied, fumbling through his pockets.

She paused for a moment, then asked: "You know it's the same price, right?"

"Yeah."

"You should get the coffee, you know. Someone out there might be drinking up beans and water that you're entitled to."

Shikamaru sighed. He knew he shouldn't have used the sans-change pants; interac only, and here was a comedian in a barista apron. "And what a deal it is," he complied tiredly, scooping up the overly garnished plate as he spoke. "But I pretty much have a hayload of vices, so let's not break the camel's back—"

THUD. One person collided very heavily with his back and the sandwich launched forwards, ejected from its parsley-laced place of rest, and landed on the floor with a mucky splat.

"Oops!" Said a voice from behind him, uttered from the mouth of the sandwich-ruining-perpetrator.

God, he realised to his painful and interminable horror, why did it have to be so ridiculously familiar? "You should watch where you're standing! Look at my papers!"

"Are you alright?" The hilarious barista asked tentatively, wiping trace cranberry mayonnaise from the corner of her now-soiled apron.

Shikamaru heaved a tired sigh. "You're wasting your time," he said to her under his breath. "She hasn't been alright for years."

"Excuse me?" The voice demanded from behind him, leaving the barista looking back and forth between the two of them, confused but nosily intrigued. "Look at me when I'm talking to—hey!"

Shikamaru turned around tiredly, then, eyeing the lineup that was building up behind the irate complainee and himself, grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her outside.

"Shika—ow!"

It had been one hell of a day, apparently, but before Shikamaru could say something along the lines of: _gee, it's nice to see you. Note that I was nearly brained using the hideous coffee mug you gave me seven years ago _—

— Ino kicked him, with full intent, quite squarely in the shin.

* * *


	2. On matters of worldly disenchantment

**Disclaimer: **Naruto Kishimoto's awesome ninja brainchild. I? Am not quite as awesome.

* * *

Outside, it had started to rain. The impending season beckoning hypnotically, the sky followed blindfolded, littered through with hot and heavy clouds and spilling cumulus-filtered rays of light and water along the scattered expanse of the street. A grey glow was cast throughout the cold, concrete expanse, dull and wan and ultimately lifeless.

And Shikamaru had mayonnaise in his shoe.

"Look," he explained rather irately, turning to his new companion and counting off on his fingers. "You owe me a sandwich, possibly a leg brace, and an explanation as to why you're here."

"Gee, Shika," replied Ino in a voice dripping with sarcasm, both hands propped against her hips. "It's certainly nice to see you, too."

When her comment was met with a silence that somehow conjured mental images of being lynched by a mob of angry protesters and her caught with a handful of burgers made from meat miscellaneous, she deferred to his powers of bizarre telepathy and scoffed, feigning flippancy.

"Well, I _was_ in the Leaf last night, and the night before, for that matter, but I guess that's a little off topic. It was a _nightmare_ getting here after the flight landed, by the way, you'd think the whole big city thing would make it more accessible, maybe a little pedestrian friendly, but seriously. Lots of concrete. So hideously grey. Buses late like you wouldn't imagine."

Shikamaru gritted his teeth.

"Don't give me that look. I'm getting to it. So I was there and stuff, and then some things happened." She appeared a little shifty at this and Shikamaru felt instantly suspicious. "But in the end, it was like, well what are you going to do about it, and we figured we'd come see you." Ino looked at him frankly, both arms over her head to shield her face from the rain. "So that's it, Mr. Fourth-Degree. Did I pass customs, or is there like some sort of surprise cavity check?"

Shikamaru actually made an attempt to open his mouth and argue that she hadn't told him anything at all, except for the fact that she was now here and had _something_ to do, in addition to possibly dropping his IQ by a few points. "_Things,_" Shikamaru reiterated and rubbed the bridge of his nose agitatedly. It was runaround for sure, and she _still _hadn't answered his question, but goddamn did he need a smoke. He fumbled in his pocket briefly while Ino watched him in utter disbelief.

"I'm cold," she deadpanned at his utter audacity.

Luckily, there was still one left. Shikamaru flicked the lighter, watching the fire flare into crimson life. "Yeah."

"Want to know _why_ I'm cold?"

A wise man once said that honesty was the best policy, so: "No," answered Shikamaru frankly.

"—Because," Ino soldiered on, ignoring him. "I'm standing out in the rain in a time-flash winter, and here I am, without my muffler."

So Shikamaru debated. There with two ploys to choose from this proverbial fork in the road and, with a little luck, both would end up with answers by the end of the day: 1) Following the creative ways of the ancient Chinese and hoping that the cold, dripping water would inevitably drive Ino crazy enough to at least spill her (real) grim purpose, or 2) taking her inside and making her warm and complacent enough to reveal said grim purpose. And considering that rain here (or anywhere else in the world, for that matter) had never before lasted quite long enough to provoke bouts of insane confession, and that the latter would be infinitely more comfortable for _him_ (and, really now, this was all that mattered), Shikamaru was leaning heavily to 2).

The clincher, though, came at exactly 1:47 PM on that Tuesday afternoon, late as he was from his break and likely to die at the hands of his enraged, boy-hating co-worker, when Yamanaka Ino broke one of the very rules of the universe, reached over, and plucked the cigarette from his fingers.

And took a drag.

Everything went strangely quiet in Shikamaru's head. It wasn't so much the fact that here had been one serious Code A violation of personal space, since when one grew up with a girl prone to violent tendencies, one learned to get used to these (often bruising) contraventions. Or even the fact that she had started smoking (and when?), but mostly because you **don't** show up and piss off and then steal the last vestiges of veritable lifeblood like that, you blood-sucking whore.

All of this, naturally, was conveyed as a few seething and soundless mouth flaps on Shikamaru's part.

"I was _cold_," Ino explained, both hands held up in a placating gesture and the cigarette shamelessly tilting from her lips.

_No_, thought Shikamaru's livid and suddenly irrational brain. Oh_ no_, she didn't. Now, there was suddenly option 3): snapping her skinny-ass neck right into half, but trace rationality deemed this one for the dreambooks, swinging, heavy and pendulous, to a resoundingly unanimous decision for 2).

"Give me back my cigarette," he sniped, with an air of 'you just brought the smack down'. "And get the hell inside."

--

Growing up in The Leaf had been a double-edged sword of sorts. For starters, it had resulted in a fairly close-knit group of friends, which, ironically enough, was the blade-edge in question. It meant that Shikamaru had spent copious amounts of his childhood playing with the children of his dad's best friends. Unfortunately, this _also_ meant that he had spent copious amounts of his childhood playing with the children of his dad's best friends. If you knew the friends in question, this would all make a sick kind of sense.

Chouji had been okay, and if Shikamaru hadn't been a guy with the emotional range of a piece of plastic, then he'd wax a little more poetic on how he had been his best friend for ever and ever, and that, until the latter years, they had rarely spent a day apart. Chouji had always stoically agreed upon the understated therapeutic properties of cloud-watching. But in the end, Shikamaru wasn't, so Chouji, for all intents and purposes, had been _okay._

Ino had been – well, more on this later.

The majority of his class (yes, they had gone through all the grades together, a process that reeked strongly of those Friday-night family sitcoms he sadly had all the time in the world for) had attended the (only) local dojo. The place had been built before the yuppie explosion (Pilates classes everywhere, with a healthy side of various spiritual-reinforcing practices: Ashtanga Yoga, aikido, and smoothie bars – _yes_, Ino used to tell him_, overpriced ground fruits and vegetables __**do**__improve the soul, so shut up and lend me eight dollars_), so it had been the regular, run-of-the-mill Karate kind. To be fair, however, the place had not been untouched by the invasion of the Disposable-Incomees: it had expanded, hired more teachers from around the general vicinity and paid them plenty. This didn't necessarily filter out the crazies (Kakashi-sensei had always been a tad off his rocker, and that was _without _considering those books he always read. Reading obviously-named erotica during Parents' Night? Worst idea ever. "Or the best," Kakashi had deadpanned cryptically. "Look underneath the underneath."), but it did guarantee them the most capable teachers.

Asuma had been, well, amazing. His mentor, friend, inspiration, and the only guy who had never really doubted that Shikamaru wouldn't be absolutely nothing in the endgame (including Shikamaru himself, it was really _that_ bad). But you know: emotional range, piece of plastic and all that jazz.

So, on the bright side, Shikamaru had been with the same group of kids year after year, and the possibility of improvement was rarely masked by embarassment (it became redundant after a while) and was usually fueled by rivalries (Shikamaru excluded, naturally). On the other side, it meant that Shikamaru had to share his precious childhood with the same odd-ball crazies continuously: Naruto's bizarre, slightly ADD-antics, Sasuke's borderline sociopathic disorder, Lee's – well – Lee-ness and, finally, the most violent girls the world had ever seen.

And this brings us to Ino.

Now, Ino had been the 'other child of his father's best friend', and some son-of-bitch thought it would be mighty hilarious if they had put Ino, Shikamaru and Chouji in the same individual performance teams, just like their fathers before them (le gasp!). This would be sort of fine, since Shikamaru _had_ known them before, played with them during dinners and so on and such forth. And Chouji was cool and squishy and only hit really hard when you called him fat. Except, Ino? Pummelled. Really, really, really hard. Suffering a mottled assortment of bruises in all colours of the rainy-day spectrum had not been worth it for someone's stupid shits and giggles.

And so, even though Shikamaru had been sure that he would have ended up Chouji's best friend in some other way: maybe it would have come to be on the playground, or maybe another one of the familiar family dinner parties, he was fairly convinced it would never have been the same with Ino. Time had caused the distance between 'is' and 'what-if' to dissipate, immolate, disappear into a sort of normal that really couldn't be undermined. Made it reach a point where he respected her, above all things, and knew, possibly better than anyone, all about the inner workings of her bad blood with Sakura. He knew about the ikebana and about Sasuke, about the whole touchy weight-issue and the anger-management problems. And she had never said a word. There, semi-understood, Ino had always remained the one axiom he had never bothered taking the time to figure out.

And that had been alright with him. Although there were a lot of things to lament about the trio, there had never been any assumption of an alternate reality. And in real life, this half-assed sort of bliss was all anyone could ever ask for.

So they had all been a weightier, generic version of happy. At least until Shikamaru left.

--

Now, Shikamaru had never been one to make proverbial mountains out of molehills, and anyone would contest that one sandwich, as opposed to the kind of switcheroo done by parents with a dead goldfish on their hands and their children due home any minute, actually _did_ equivalently trade for another – in this case, it might even end up far better. But he supposed his lasting grudge was not the product of a childish mind but rather a reaction that was the sum of all individual mood swings occurring since the sad moment he had deemed to wake up that very morning.

And, _seriously_.

"See?" said Ino complacently, unceremoniously plunking down one overly garnished tomato-pesto-chicken-and-sweet-and-sour-sauce-on-ridiculously-hard-to-pronounce-bread squarely onto their table; five medium-sized coffee cups nestled between her arm and chest. "One of three problems _easily _solved – even though we both know you don't really need the back brace."

Shikamaru gave it the once over. And it was good thing that he never ate sandwiches with uber-hyphenated names purely on principle since Ino, after nestling herself and the coffee cups down in the seat across from him, reached right over and plucked up one half.

"Wasn't that barista just awesome?" She commented around a mouthful of the complicated sandwich. "She insisted on giving me all the cups of coffee you haven't been taking. Seriously, Shikamaru, you were totally entitled to these."

If Shikamaru didn't know better, she was being rather shifty after all, overly-cheerful and a little too familiar after having not seen or heard from him for the upside of three years. In addition to that, she looked depressingly thin and he had seen her hitch her jeans up around her waist at least once or twice.

He had to ask. "What size are your pants?"

"Um… I don't know," answered Ino, considering. "25? Oh, here she comes!"

The barista had toddled over, pen and paper in hand and Shikamaru, despite having eaten here almost every week for the past several months, had absolutely no idea they waited tables. "Would you guys like anything to drink?"

He was about refuse before Ino sprang to animated life. "Yes. One large West-Coast latté, please. Wait, no – make that Italian, super-dark, possibly, like, six shots?"

"You already have coffee," Shikamaru deadpanned, indicating the five cups on their table.

"Oh no," said Ino flippantly. "These aren't for me."

The barista, clearly deprived of the happy act of order-taking in Shikamaru's vicinity, joyfully jotted it all down. "Then who – wait – _six shots_?" Gaped Shikamaru in disbelief, about to comment that, what with the skinniness and the smoking and caffeine, she somehow seemed to have cultivated a propensity to massive heart-failure in his absence, but then she stood up and excused herself to bathroom to fix her malfunctioning belt.

25 inches, he thought, the notion conjuring up his mother's conspiratorial sotto-voce as the Nishizaki's had left for their own home: "I thought she was going to break in half, poor thing."

"Is your friend a model, or something?" The barista asked somewhat wistfully, looking after Ino. Then, her expression turning troubled, said: "Oops. I forgot to ask what her milk preference was."

Shikamaru shot her a withering glance. "Just coffee for me, thanks," he snapped, a tad unnecessarily at her. "Black. And she'll take 18 percent cream in her latté, only two shots caffeinated, four decaf. And don't bother bringing them over – I'll come pick them up when they're done."

The barista looked as though she was about to protest, but thought better of it and slank away to make the drinks, only throwing one bitter look for Shikamaru's meanness before leaving.

Contrary to popular belief, the world did _not_ stand still merely upon necessity. Shikamaru glanced at his watch and lamented the whopping forty-nine lunchtime overdue minutes it read, and acknowledged that he was clearly living on borrowed time here. Sadly considering Asahi, _living_ had been a painfully fitting wordchoice.

Ino returned a moment later, sliding into the opposite benchseat. "You haven't touched the sandwich," she pointed out, swiping up the other half without his consent. Luckily, the surprise and subsequent shenanigans had caused his appetite to go the way of his lunch hour, but that still didn't quite make it okay.

"Alright," he started agitatedly, rubbing both temples with disturbing fervour. "I – just – _why_ are you here, again?"

Ino glanced back towards the espresso bar for their in-progress drinks. "Why are you being so weird?" She prevaricated shiftily. "Could it be _so_ strange that I'm just here to see you?"

Weird? Given the fact that Ino had shown up as basically 5 feet 6 of weirdness in oddly slouchy jeans, Shikamaru assumed that she might have been joking. And if not for the undertone of serious intent inherent in her (remembered) lilting tone, he would have.

Shikamaru, sighing indulgently, leaned forward. "Ino. I have an angry coworker waiting to lynch me and string me up on her Christmas tree this upcoming season, one less cigarette in my pocket and no explanation as to why you're here. So, why. Are. You. Here?"

Ino gave him a withering look. "I'm not lying. There are a few reasons, possibly including but not limited to, a future favour that I may or may not need, but that's neither here nor there." And when Shikamaru's expression suddenly took an express turn for the worse, added complacently: "But really, above all things, we're actually here to see you."

And despite the fact that he wanted, order notwithstanding, a real explanation for her supremely-shifty return – and no, he wasn't convinced that it was to play quirky insouciant to his disenchanted everyman– one change of departments, a smoke, a sandwich and a long, fulfilling nap, Shikamaru staked this one as a sulky cease-fire, turning tiredly towards the adjacent window and looking forlornly down the street. Outside, it had stopped raining.

Regaining sullen equilibrium and turning back to her, the word 'we' ricocheting suspiciously through his brain like a boomerang ill-omen, Shikamaru asked: "So what's this 'favor'?"

* * *

**A/N: **Argh... written in one blinding go, so pardon the errors. Reviews still warrant... um, a good word to heaven if I get there first? ♥ 


	3. The Downpour

**A/N**: Naruto? Not mine, folks. Happy reading.

* * *

- - - 

Back at the Leaf, the trio had always met Asuma at the new Korean barbeque joint around corner, for reasons including, but not limited to, the fact that Chouji had somehow earned them all a verified frequent flier discounts at the place. The restaurant had ridden in on the trendy new wave of Asian-themed eateries, although it hadn't made the biggest splash of the lot: if not for the insanely cool grills artfully placed in the centre of all the tables, the grease and super-savory delights were just a little_ too_ indulgent for the sado-masochistic, self-deniant yuppies.

Asuma had watched a couple practicing meditation on the perfectly-manicured lawn outside with a suspiciously raised eyebrow, shaking his head over his lighter.

"One day," Shikamaru threatened blandly, poking at the strips of meat sizzling on the grill. "They'll make this place non-smoking. What'll you do then, I wonder?"

"You know," interceded Asuma, hand still cupped over the lighter and cigarette dangling haphazardly from his lips. "This is all bullshit." He raised one arm, indicating outside and the couple placed there.

Shikamaru looked at them carefully, impeccable posture from years of parent-paid ballet lessons, good skin, toned whatever. Whatever trace spirituality that still lingered in the act was quashed by the superficiality of it all. But, hey, Shikamaru wasn't an unfair person.

"Maybe," he said, dangling another piece of meat over the grill. "We're all just horribly biased against the Disposable-Incomees."

Asuma grinned ruefully. "What? For stealing our land, ostentatiously changing our neighborhoods and marrying our women? Never." He had an incredibly agreeable smile on his face suddenly, like the notion of a stake-and-torch overthrow was totally on the menu. "That's not what I'm talking about, though," Asuma conceded. "I mean, _this_," he gestured to the lawn. "The belief, the spirituality."

The topic seemed a little heavy for such a lovely day. Shikamaru looked at him a little ruefully for the introduction of such heavy subject matter, and leaned back, having always been one relatively okay with backing down from intellectual challenges.

"You know what I mean," Asuma began, waving the unashed cigarette at him, causing an ember-lit streak to linger in Shikamaru's line of sight. "The framework lacks –"

"—Perfection?" Finished Shikamaru with a hard roll of his eyes, conceding to the bait. "You're right, I guess. Something's gotta give for the rest to fit. To prove something, you ultimately have to disprove the vehicle with which you arrive with your proof. Godel's Incompleteness Theorem—"

Asuma looked at him, dumbstruck.

"—Or something like that," Shikamaru sighed, leaning his head down on the table.

Shaking his head, Asuma broke out into a delirious grin; in the distance, Shikamaru watched as storm clouds rumbled on the horizon, ominous and overcast. The general vicinity had a certain flatness to the topography and the Leaf had been notorious for its view of miles and miles around (Naruto had once attested, wide-eyed, that he had seen Akamaru run away for three days that one time he and Kiba got into a rare and ridiculous fight). Imminent storms were basically a non-existent phenomenon. You always saw it coming.

"So," his teacher croaked amusedly. "You don't buy, I guess."

"It doesn't matter, does it?" He began absently. Two blocks down the straight lane, Shikamaru spotted Chouji and Ino step onto the sidewalk, the thought occurring to him that _somewhere_, somewhere it had to be written in stone, the universal law that Ino was perpetually late for everything.

Asuma frowned. "It does. You need to believe in something. If there's an issue with the framework, then make your own."

Shikamaru looked at him wearily. "What's _with_ all this? You're being very…"

Grinning, Asuma interjected: "Sagacious?"

"I was thinking more 'obnoxiously cryptic'," corrected Shikamaru, lifting another piece of meat to his mouth as the doors swung open behind him, Ino's telltale nag and the _rustle rustle_ of Chouji's potato chip bag seeming to fill the expanses of the restaurant.

"Hey," Asuma said, chuckling around the smoked-down cigarette as he slid over to make room. "I'm trying to leave you with some life-long philosophy, here."

"Move over!" Ino said by way of greeting, thumping Shikamaru rather brutally in the stomach.

He sighed, sliding over. "Depends on how long the life is, though."

That had been on Monday.

- - -

* * *

- - - 

Mr. Narita had _not _been pleased.

When the two passed back through the parkette, shoulders hunched unaccustomedly to the bitter cold, he had still been there behind the junked-out stone chessboard, pockmarked from acid rain years and bird-beak staccatos, taking a brief moment of delicious glory after he had wiped the proverbial floor with T&T's tiny form.

In chess, anyway.

"You know," he commented darkly, glowering as the two passed through his park-bench vicinity with heads tucked low into their collars. "That sure doesn't look like a sandwich to me."

This was growing old. Any moment now, Shikamaru was sure the gods would stop shitting him. "No," he agreed over one shoulder, slowing down in a marginally-friendly way, but still keeping decent pace. "She's just a remarkably anthropomorphic one, believe me."

Ino had come to a confused halt, staring between the elderly man on the bench and Shikamaru's receding back for one befuddled moment before deciding that the only way to deal with people of the less-than-sane persuasion was to not make any sudden movements and back away slowly. Appropriate offerings also did wonders, if the black and stormy days of Sakura's weepy period were any indication.

"Get back here, you little worm!" Mr. Narita hollered suddenly, coming to the quick decision that the relative trade-off between the effort it would take to make an equally snappy comeback to Shikamaru's snappy retort and the subsequent 7.0-on-the-Richter migraine this kid gave him every time he opened his mouth was just simply not worth it. "You owe me a game, damnit!"

Shikamaru heaved a sigh, slowing to a standstill. "Sorry old man," he offered abortively. "I'm…" Walking the green mile? Breathing my last few breaths? Please, Mr. Narita, pray fervently for me? "…On a mission. I'll owe you." At Mr. Narita's sudden intake of breath: "—Again. I know, I remember."

"Hold on," Ino interjected (loudly, as was her modus operandi), believing that she was entitled to answers, or something. She decidedly left one of the four remaining coffee cups (she had mixed one into her latte, which, for some unfathomable reason, was a piddly excuse for caffeine for a heavy-weight like her) squarely on the worn stone chessboard in front of Mr. Narita, who looked at her with a blend of jealous distaste (for being a chessmate-stealing bitch) and also mild curiosity. "Where exactly are we going, again?"

"Listen, I'm late for an execution," Shikamaru stated, a profound note to his voice. "So safe trip home, alright?"

Shikamaru supposed that it _had_ been a rather crappy reaction, but, to be fair, Ino's had been a rather crappy request. And one was always entitled to grade-A asshattery when propositioned thusly.

Even so, she had asked nevertheless. And this was how it went.

- - -

* * *

- - - 

"So what's this _favour_ I keep hearing about?" Shikamaru asked warily, leaning back into his chair with an air of cautious disapproval. "A kidney? My liver? Although, to be fair, you owe _me_ a lotof money."

"No, not the first-born-child kind," Ino agreed, glancing back over at the espresso bar. She fiddled with the hem of her skirt and raised an eyebrow. "Are our drinks ready yet?"

"No," Shikamaru interjected blandly.

Ino frowned over the tabletop at his brusque reply. "You don't have to be rude. How the hell would you know if you don't go over there and pick them up, anyway?"

Sighing, Shikamaru leaned forward, pointedly glancing at his watch with an air of "time's 'a wastin'" before looking back at her expectantly.

But if the past twenty-something years had been _any _indication, Ino had never been one to take a freaking hint. Departing from the table, she made her way back to the counter, returning after a few testy moments with her latte and a cold coffee.

Brilliant.

If Shikamaru had any intention of drinking the stuff anyway (which was, by the way, oozing hippie in all places – volcanic ash, high-altitude, shade-grown Arabica beans that they _didn't_ pay the poor farmers pennies for every six-dollar latte, rainforest friendly, etc. etc.) he would have noticed that his snappy comment to the barista had resulted in his coffee being poured _first_ and sitting, losing heat and subjected to the elements, upon the counter while Ino's latte was lovingly being steamed. And his? Lukewarm as hell. And $3.99, too.

But, anyway.

"Favour," Shikamaru prompted in a not-so-subtle way and Ino gave him a sidelong glance from her cup, head tilted back in mid-gulp.

"Fine, geez." She placed it down in front of her with a huffy sigh, scowling equally at him and her latte with a disdainful frown. "Hey, this stuff? Tastes like crap, you know."

"Listen, did you spend several hundred on a plane ticket to come and prevaricate on my borrowed time?"

Ino gave him a withering look. "And you're an asshole, you know that?"

"Favour," Shikamaru pressed on, not to be swayed.

Something weird happened then: a hush washed in, the sky obscured with a chill veil, clouds moving towards them, and the lighting suddenly changed – with the fluctuating illumination, so did the expression on her face.

In later moments of backwards rumination, Shikamaru would have lamented the fact that he had stayed seated, wished he had stood up at that very moment and walked through that door without looking back, but inevitably these things don't go away with careful amounts of regret and you get by without them.

She said: "There's someone I need to find. Will you come with me?"

And if he had been listening – _really _listening, rather than staving off immense incredulity at the sheer notion of her ridiculous request – Shikamaru would have heard a note of something else tingeing the edges of her somewhat-familiar voice, an air of guilty sadness that he didn't really comprehend. His mind, though, working on a sleepy default of shrewdity, filed the notion away for later. It would bite him in the ass, eventually. Everything always did.

What he should have known then was that something was wrong – very wrong – and that the only time he had seen that look on her face had been one day, so and so many years ago, when she had forgotten to feed Sakura's pet fish. He should have known the moment the vigilant voice echoing through the recesses of his brain went absolutely rabid and resounded with a precise and booming: _careful_.

But he didn't.

Instead, Shikamaru looked at her incredulously across the short expanse of the table, thinking of a number of retorts consisting of an abortive string of words that would roughly equate 'Are you freaking crazy?' Because there was _work _and there was _life_ and sundry other things that didn't stray too far from the above subheadings, and Shikamaru was sure Ino's little treasure hunt would consist of a lot of missed days and considerable effort and lots of things with which Shikamaru was not openly comfortable.

Ever voluble were his subsequent soundless mouth flaps, and in the end, he opted for a very simple: "What?"

Ino gave a vaguely feral growl. "Ugh… Shikamaru, I'm asking you for this _one_ favour. You can't help me this _once_?"

"No," he said with a resounding note of finality, moving his coffee cup to the side. "This is crazy. You know it is—" At this, she gave him a mildly shifty look. "And you'd better fess up to exactly what it is you're really here for—"

"Just stop, okay?" She interjected pettily, popping open the lid of her latte to dump in one of her free cups of coffee, courtesy of Shikamaru's unintentional goodwill. "It's a guy. Alright?"

Shikamaru paused. Stashed somewhere in the back of his memory was receiving an email from his mother ("Because," read the sarcastically dripping text. "God forbid you should deign to check your voicemail once a millennia.") about Ino's joyous engagement to that Eiki-fellow. She had been elated. Shikamaru had been pleased, but clearly not enough to go home or, god forbid, call her with any jubilant congratulations. He had left home indefinitely for his own reasons. Plus, it just wasn't his style.

Shikamaru watched her, prompting her with his silence. Eventually she gave in. "He… um… doesn't live in the Leaf anymore… I have something I need to ask him." She lapsed back into pale silence, avoiding his gaze intently. He accredited it to the deduced fact that apparently the engagement had fallen through and mentally conceded to the fact that, yes, he really _should_ check his voicemail more often.

Sighing, Shikamaru leaned back against his seat. "What does this have to do with me?"

Ino wasn't wasting any time. "He's holed up near here, some weird backwater town without an airport. I need your help. Well, mostly your car."

"Ino," he pronounced slowly. "I can't just up and leave any day I want. I have a job, mind you."

Looking affronted, Ino leaned forward. "Oh right, that little set-up you got through pseudo-nepotism." She looked a little bitter.

"Asuma wasn't related to me."

Ino waved a flippant hand at his comment. "Same difference."

Ino had always been able to wear his patience to a hair-thin thread in her own, thankfully patented way. Apparent broken engagement aside, there was really only so much sympathy one could feel for this girl. "Ino," he said, rubbing the bridge of his nose agitatedly. "The answer is _no_. Now I have to go, but I'll walk you to the subway station."

At which point he promptly gathered up his stuff and made his way past the gawking barista and out the front door, Ino protesting affrontedly at his heels.

- - -

* * *

- - - 

Fine, so he was being an utter asshole. Fine, so this was more like breaking through _utter asshole_ and falling flat on your ass as _son-of-a-bitch supreme_. And _fine_, considering that he was leaving a girl (who, let it be mentioned, happened to be one of his oldest acquaintances ever) alone and, god forbid, homeless in the big city, this was likely more akin to spending all your childhood afternoons with Satan, with the teacups and the hair-braiding and golf games and all.

"Shikamaru!" Came her pissed-off yell from behind him and he didn't feel particularly compelled to turn around. But he did, partially because she did sound a little whacked-out insane what with being out in the cold and the fact that it suddenly started to rain, but mostly because he suspected she was about to take off her shoe and toss it at the back of his head. He had already evaded one shoe-related encounter today and wasn't about to let his efforts go to naught.

"Please," Ino said somewhat desperately, and her untied shoelaces merely confirmed his suspicion. "There's something I really need to know."

Shikamaru rolled his eyes. The rain clouds were converging now, a confluence of chill dirty grey all along the cluttered horizon, and maybe if he hurried, he'd beat the rain.

"Chouji can't help you," he backtracked hopefully, although deep down knew that the suggestion made very little sense whatsoever. If her runaway bridegroom was in the near vicinity, even _Ino_ could make the logical choice and come to ask him. Just because it was logical, though, didn't make it anymore palatable for him.

"Shikamaru," she confessed cryptically. "For reasons I can't really tell you about now, you have to come with me."

"What?"

"Please," Ino repeated and Mr. Narita glanced up at him pleadingly, suddenly sympathetic to her cryptic cause – or at least, the desolate note to her plea. "Chouji can't come. He's got something he needs to deal with back home. So just say 'yes', okay?"

"No," Shikamaru decided bluntly, turning tail and stalking off in the opposite direction. The storm clouds loomed ever closer and he feared the probable risk of being utterly soaked. The morning had started out so beautifully, too. Until he woke up, at least.

She gave a frustrated growl and turned to Mr. Narita beseechingly. "What do I do now?" Ino appealed to him weepily. "Chouji and I have nowhere to stay!"

So Chouji was here too? This made Shikamaru pause a little in his tracks and almost – almost – turn around. But in the end, it was the tone in Mr. Narita's voice, as he yelled down the paved walkway: "You get back here, you monster! Don't you dare leave her alone!" In a voice that might have described some war-camp atrocity and made the old lady feeding pigeons two benches down jump a solid foot in the air.

People were staring now, and Shikamaru was not going to be made into a girl-ditching spectacle if he could help it. He marched back and promptly grabbed her by the elbow, stage whispering agitatedly: "Fine, we'll get you guys a hotel or something and then sort out what's going to happen, okay?"

Ino smiled at him smugly, and then brutally whacked him in the arm that held her captive. "Sounds good to me," she said, totally singsong, as he winced from the pain and let go.

"Fine," conceded Shikamaru tiredly, rubbing his sore arm. "Let's find Chouji first, okay? I'd like to talk to someone with some sense."

Above them, the sky was made luminous for a brief moment in time and then came the lagging thunder, like the precedence of senses: first light, then sound, before the onslaught of cold and bitter rain from the bruised and looming sky.

It had caught up to them, after all.

- - -

* * *

Thoughts? More? Reviews are a part of a balanced diet, so c'mon folks, hit me ♥. 


	4. She sets the pace

* * *

They sat there for all of forty-two minutes, in which time the sun miraculously opted to make a surprise appearance and the temperature lobbied fast, rising almost palpably by the moment. Forty two minutes, but for all Ino's incessant restlessness, Shikamaru swore it had been hours.

He watched her rip at a ragged hangnail one last time before speaking. "So, you two just randomly decided to pay me a visit out here, huh?"

"Yup." Chew, rip.

"Even though you knew I was coming home in two months for the wedding."

"Right." She cupped a hand above her eyes and glared out at the occupied runway, as though the sheer force of her gaze would conjure Chouji's plane from thin air.

"Uh-huh." Sighing, Shikamaru leaned back against the near wall. Some sort of faux marble that felt cold through his shirt. "And about this favor you mentioned?"

"Look, can we talk about this later?" Her legs dangled over the edge of the railing, swinging anxiously over the slanted drop below. Shikamaru wondered belatedly why she hadn't opted for a seat. But then again, Ino had always been weird like that. "God, it's been _how_ long now?"

Shikamaru gave her a sidelong glance. It was fairly obvious that Ino was acting strange and cagey, and it wasn't the kind of change you could chalk up to three years of separation. Unfortunately, it was more the type of bizarre that meant something, somewhere out in the universe (or, to Shikamaru's unending chagrin, likely closer) was or was going to be horribly, horribly wrong.

Brilliant. He tried to logically weigh the ups and downs of asking versus flat-out repression but came to a simpler conclusion. Shikamaru had never been one for facing his obstacles head-on before, and you know what they said about old habits.

"Come on, Chouji," Ino was pleading at the runway. "My ass is getting cramped just sitting here."

"You haven't been just sitting there," Shikamaru pointed out evenly, glancing at her violently fidgeting leg. "Why didn't you come on the same flight as Chouji?"

"God, I don't know. My flight only had one seat left or something. Can you just let up with all the questions for once? We came to visit you, Shikamaru, end of story."

"You – okay, fine. Then about the whole favor thing –"

"Well, we'd talk too, right?" Ino shrugged. "Let's just do this later, Shika. I think Chouji's flight just got here. Look, look: here he comes."

* * *

Ino reached him first, not-so-daintily barreling a path through the frantic, motley crew of fliers, and tapped him twice on the shoulder. Chouji turned at the first brush of fingers against his rumpled sweater.

"Ino!"

"Hi. Oh my god," she noted as a woman pushed past her towards customs. "Flying's a death wish around here. No wonder Shikamaru never visits."

Chouji grinned and scratched his chin thoughtfully. "Where's Shikamaru?" He asked as a man elbowed past him towards the luggage carousel.

"Oh, here." She made a flippant gesture at the roiling crowd. "You know, somewhere."

"Huh? Where? How is he? Is he okay?"

"I guess," she shrugged. "I mean… I haven't really told him, but –""

Chouji blinked at her. "You haven't told him?"

A woman rudely nudged past Ino's shoulder. "No," she said. "I haven't."

"But Ino –"

Sighing huffily, Ino shoved back at the man trying to hurry her along. "I know, Chouji."

"It's just that I thought that – "

"Chouji, _I know_," she shrieked, glancing around them frustratedly. "I know. Look, I tried. Well, no, I didn't."

Chouji hated flying, hated sitting in the cramped little seats thousands of feet above the earth, one stranger snoozing deeply on your shoulder and the other trying to convert you to their own fervent Christian sect. It always felt unnatural, intruding in this other, empty world, where no human feet were likely intended to tread. And so flying was a near never for him, except across the country to see the best friend he had ever had, and even then, only armed with a heavy artillery of snack bars and energy drinks to compensate for the acrophobic anxiety, the eve of sleeplessness. But still, it was only at this very moment that weariness really set into his bones.

All around them, the crowd rushed like a hostile river and Chouji knew that at any moment now Shikamaru would find them. He hadn't wanted to be the one to tell him, but then again, life was sometimes all about things you didn't like.

"Chouji, I've got to go to Isu," Ino said then, biting at a jagged fingernail. She was doing that a lot lately.

"No, please don't go to Isu, Ino. You know that's no good. Let's just tell Shikamaru and get him to come home with us. I can tell him if you want."

It was a good plan, the original plan. Ino was supposed to head out here first and break the news, mostly because Chouji wasn't sure what he'd say. Why it had taken so long. What had happened. But that didn't matter, the important thing was letting Shikamaru know and bringing him home. The plan. But Ino was shaking her head, looking distracted. "Uh-uh," she said. "That's a bad idea, Chouji, believe me. Let's just go to Isu, like all three of us, okay? We'll get Shikamaru to drive. And we can tell him then."

Which was when, as fate would have it, two hurried people parted and Shikamaru found them at last, heads bent conspiratorially and the last words of their conversation hanging thickly in the air.

He raised an eyebrow. "Tell me what, exactly?"

* * *

Stupid, Shikamaru thought to himself.

The rush from the gate was unprecedented, to say the least. In the few years since arriving here, he had clearly forgotten what it was like to emerge from a late flight, disgruntled and underfed, simultaneously looking for your luggage, your ride and your sanity. That way, he would've been prepared to move against the rush once Ino barely finished her sentence and darted off into the fray. He endured a barrage of hefty shoves as he beat a path through the mob, but Shikamaru just rolled his eyes and forged on. Airport violence, in his opinion, was the kind you just shouldered heroically. Post-flight status was very nearly equivalent to insanity. Any given person in that waiting room would have been trigger-happy about ripping him a new one.

A man passed, cradling a wailing baby. Shikamaru stepped by two twin sisters looking for their luggage. A child and his grandmother wandered past, speaking some foreign language.

Then he found them, the two standing completely still in the fray, Ino with a pleading expression on her face and Chouji looking distinctly uncomfortable. What had he just missed here?

"—We'll tell him then," she finished.

"Tell me what?"

Shikamaru would always remember the way those two jumped guiltily at the sound of his voice. At the moment, it was all rather hilarious. In hindsight, he figured he should've seen it all coming.

"Hey, Chouji's here," Ino offered, a tad unnecessarily. "He just… got here."

Shikamaru gritted his teeth and mulled over his options: something was obviously going on here the likes of which he wasn't too sure he'd enjoy. Given Ino and Chouji's supremely sketchy behaviour…

Well, 'unenjoyable' was kind of a no-brainer.

"Okay then, just tell me this: is this going to come back and bite me in the ass in the near future or thereabout?"

Chouji just glanced at Ino, who in turn adopted her custom look of resolute stubbornness. "God, Shikamaru, don't be such a drama queen."

And that was that. Shikamaru had never really been one for facing his problems head-on anyway and he sure as hell wasn't going to start now. Besides, peace and quiet (or some vague semblance thereof) was a hard thing to put back together once broken. And any moment now, knowing Chouji…

"I'm hungry," he moaned, rubbing at his stomach. "Can we get some food before we go?"

"You're always hungry." Ino rolled her eyes. " Haven't you heard of watching your weight?"

"Nuh-uh; I figure it'd be pretty cold if I was skinny. This way I'm comfortable, see? Oh, hey Shikamaru, do you have any food at your place? I'm broke."

"Sorry Chouji," he answered dully. This place was kind of getting to him. what with the mass overload of restless anxiety crawling through the woodwork. And then there was still that feeling that he was missing something important. Something he couldn't quite put his finger on. "Don't you want to drop off your bags and stuff at the hotel first?"

Chouji blinked. "Hotel?"

Aha. "No." Shikamaru turned painstakingly to the girl at his side. "Tell me he's kidding."

Ino looked unapologetic. "Don't be stupid."

"You didn't book a hotel room," it was more a statement of disbelief rather than a question.

She sighed. "Well, I thought it would be fine if we just stayed with you," Ino explained unapologetically. "I still don't see why we can't."

"I don't know. Maybe it's because, for starters, you guys show up completely unexpected, then you drop the bomb in saying you're _staying_? And at my place? What?"

Chouji looked dumbfounded. He turned to Ino. "I thought you called him."

Shikamaru sighed inwardly. Ino hadn't called him. Of course Ino hadn't called him. Ino had just shown up on his precious lunch hour, give or take three years, and nearly assaulted him and his sandwich. "Chouji, you guys can't stay with me. My place is tiny. Like one-bedroom kind of tiny."

He threw this curveball to throw Ino off the prospect of comfort, but she was clearly not to be swayed. "Details. I'll just take the bed and you two can take the living room. It's not like we haven't camped out before?"

Shikamaru couldn't see how her getting the only bed in the apartment while him and Chouji braved the hardwood floors near-winter even got close to roughing it. On her part. But then again, Ino _had_ spent the majority of their overnight dojo trips whining about the sub-par quality of sleeping bag fabric and totally decimated Shikamaru's chances at a decent night's rest like clockwork. Then came black belt, third dan and he vowed never to sleep within hearing distance of her again.

"No, you guys can't stay with me. My landlord would freak if she found you there." Chouji opened his mouth to protest, but Shikamaru cut him off before he had the chance. "— _Even_ if it's only for a day. A few. Or a week –"

Ino propped her hands on her hips. "Three," she corrected.

"What! No, whatever. The answer's definitely no, guys."

Ino just squinted at him in disbelief while Chouji looked sort of hurt. Shikamaru couldn't help his mind from straying to the world-time clocks overhead and thinking that forty miles into the downtown core, Asahi was just off shift now, likely breathing fire and hunting his blood. Workplace safety was deeply lacking in these parts, seeing as Asahi was the kind of coworker that brought new meaning to the term "poisoned atmosphere".

Crossing her arms, Ino gave a loud sigh. "Well, your life sounds really hard Shikamaru, but we? Don't have any money. Unfortunately."

Chouji nodded. "Yeah. Sorry, I just spent the last of it on the plane ticket here."

Shikamaru just stared at them like they had grown extra heads.

"So, are you going to toss your two oldest friends out onto the streets of this sleazy city?" A woman, clearly a citizen of the so-called 'sleazy city', gave Ino a dirty look as she passed. Ino ignored her, tugging on Chouji's sleeve. "Chouji, your luggage. Come on, someone's going to steal it."

"Ino, I don't think – "

"Of course they will. This is the city, stupid, lots of crazies live here. For example, Shikamaru lives here."

And on that high note, the two stalked off towards the rotating carousel, leaving a very frustrated person in their ruined wake. Shikamaru took a deep breath and sighed, desperately crushing the urge to clutch at his wildly throbbing temples. This day had gone from bad to worse in the space of one lunch hour – since losing his sandwich, his chess partner's respect and then the latter half of his workday (read: his chance at redeeming his life come the very next business hour), Shikamaru now faced a brand new smattering of issues that might possibly leave him broke and/or broken by the end of the week.

On a more optimistic note, both new arrivals were still semi-staples on his list of Things He Missed About Home But Would Never Admit To, and if he was _really_ lucky, Chouji might have brought some of his aunt's awesome peanut butter cookies. Failing all that, there was always the comforting thought that hey, he still had his life and sanity.

At least, for now.

* * *

The gas meter had dipped dangerously towards empty on their frantic search for a vacant hotel room, so Shikamaru had had to spring for gas along the way ("That didn't count," said Ino, firmly protesting his threat of starting up an expense tab. "Totally your own negligence."). When they finally found a place that didn't look like it was crawling with vermin all through the woodwork, in addition to having running water and various other important creature comforts, his two (currently) homeless teammates happily watched him shell over the cash. This day had just passed 'expensive' back around the hundredth dollar.

Shikamaru hated it when he was right.

"Thanks a lot," Chouji was saying. He looked a little uncomfortable in the overly lavish room but kept tossing anxious looks over at the complimentary mints on the pillows. "But I think I would've been fine with your couch."

Ino thwacked him on the shoulder. "Chouji, shut up. If Shikamaru's willing to pay, then let's not stop his uncharacteristic kindness. Besides, it's too late anyway."

Chouji looked apologetic, Ino didn't even look close. She picked up a chocolate-covered strawberry and popped it into her mouth.

"Hey. Where did you get that?" Though something was telling Shikamaru that he really didn't want to know.

"Room service."

Chouji looked up. "Ino—"

"I know, I know. I'll pay you back, Shika, don't worry."

Sighing, Shikamaru sat down beside her on the edge of the blue bedspread. Chouji dragged his red armchair closer to the other two and both guys looked expectantly over at the blonde girl beside them.

"Well?" Shikamaru prompted.

Ino bit her lip thoughtfully, as though weighing the relative pros and cons of saying anything about the cryptic reasons behind their sudden journey. After a moment of struggling with his rapidly deteriorating patience, Shikamaru spoke up. Frankly, this was starting to piss him off.

"Okay, seriously. You're telling me by, um, _not_ telling me anything at all, that you two effectively shelled out how much in cash to haul your asses out across the country just to get me to buy you a room so we could sit around and smile at other like douches for a week?"

"Three," Ino corrected.

"Okay, three."

Nearby, Chouji was crumbling under guilt; after all these years, Shikamaru and Ino were both very well aware of his extremely oversized heart (figuratively, of course) and instead of watching him sweat absolute bullets while torn between the loyalty to his two best friends, Ino – for once – did the right thing and put him out of his misery.

"Okay," she started huffily, rearranging her legs beneath her. "Well, yes, I guess we did come out to see you, a little bit." At this, Chouji gave a her a furtive glance. "But there was also that favor. You know, the one I mentioned. About the guy." Another furtive glance. This was getting highly suspicious.

"The guy… that is or isn't your current fiancé?"

Ino blinked. "Doesn't matter. I just kind of need a break from home, is all, and figured that since we haven't seen you for a while we'd stop by out here and… _kindly request_ that you escort us on this incredibly important mission. Of sorts." The end of her sentence quickly tapered off.

"Huh."

Chouji gulped audibly. "Ino –"

She silenced him with a quick glare. "Besides, you totally know what it's like to be holed up back there. There's no _space_."

"Ino –" Chouji tried.

"Just one favor," she finished, tying up her request. "Come on, Shika. I'll spring for gas."

Shikamaru sighed. Ino wouldn't know what to do with _please_ if it jumped out and bit her on the ass, meaning that this was the closest they'd get to a polite demand this side of the century. One favor, huh?

"You don't have any money," he observed, turning to Chouji. "Neither of you do."

"I have a _little_," Ino corrected. "I wasn't going to truck my ass all the way out here without any. That would make me crazy."

At this point, Chouji had totally given up the ghost on his abortive protests and instead nestled back into the voluminous covers, carefully chomping on an engorged strawberry. Shikamaru felt exactly how he looked. So instead of bringing up how the last of her comments was kind of a scarily accurate observation, he just ashed his cigarette on a suspiciously pristine crystal ashtray and signed his life away.

"Okay," he answered. "Let's do it."

Chouji gave him a depressing kind of half-smile. Ino grinned brilliantly. "Awesome. I knew you'd be up for it, Shikamaru!"

He sighed and moved to stand up. "You're going home?" Chouji asked, sounding a little disappointed.

"Yeah. Looks like I've got a long week ahead of me."

"Three," Ino corrected, turning on the television. "Hey, do you get satellite on this thing?"

* * *


End file.
